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Unintended Consequences — Part 3
In focusing the anthropological lens on cannibalism, Whitehead
is not alone. Another recent book — Beth Conklin's Consuming
Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society —
has emerged to paint a warmer, fuzzier picture of a practice most
people have been perfectly willing to dismiss as twisted.
 Conklin,
an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University, studied the Wari tribe
in South America, where, until recently, in-laws ritually ate parts
of their dead relatives. Until pressure from government officials
and missionaries forced the Wari to desist about forty years ago,
the grisly ritual was an integral part of the emotional recovery
from death, Conklin says. “It marked a distance between the
people doing the eating and the person who is eaten,” she
says. “The Wari believe you need to gradually create emotional
distance between the living and the dead, because in a small society,
the ties of love and affection to your family are your strongest
bonds, and they don't dissolve or loosen with death.”
Conklin's and Whitehead's attempts to understand, rather
than condemn, cannibalism have forced them to ponder the interpretation
of their work. As Conklin puts it, Whitehead “is trying to
grapple with the problem of taking violence in indigenous society
seriously — trying to understand it in ways that don't
reinforce stereotypes of savagery.”
But Whitehead is aware that his work could regenerate some of those
stereotypes. “The concern is that you end up painting a picture
of a bunch of violent savages,” he says. “This is the
difficult aspect of deciding to write about a topic that doesn't
cast people in the best light. It's a political, cultural
issue that faces anthropology, and I'm very conscious of pushing
the envelope on that.”
At the same time, Whitehead's observations are upsetting
to people who prefer to regard shamans as sacred healers. Recently,
when Whitehead read from Dark Shamans at a Madison bookstore,
some audience members were unsettled by his focus on dark shamanism.
But the professor responded that these darker forms of sorcery are
common in the continent: “Kanaimà is actually not exceptional;
it's one example of a very important aspect of shamanism in
South America,” he says. “There's been an emphasis
on the curing, beneficial aspects of shamanism. We want to set the
ethnographic record straight by reminding people of the very important
cosmological links between the power to kill and the power to cure.
They represent complementary possibilities of the universe, and
are fundamental to the way shamanic activity
is conceived.”
Furthermore, Whitehead argues that a full discussion of cannibalism
must extend beyond South America and tribal cultures. He notes that
perspective matters — especially since history is generally
written by victors. “The history of conquest in South America
looks very different from Europe than from South America,”
he says. While the Spanish were massacring Indians, he points out,
“the Europeans were talking about nailing people to crosses
and hanging, drawing, and quartering. There were public executions
and body snatching.”
In essence, he notes, one person's cannibal is another's
cultural hero.
“Braveheart [William Wallace, a medieval Scottish rebel]
was ripped to pieces,” he adds. “There was plenty of
torture in the medieval period — it's not just cannibals
that are sticking heads on spikes, right?”
Yet attempts to place cannibalism within a broader context can
be seen as justifications for it. Whitehead and others who write
about practices like cannibalism are often criticized for practicing
cultural relativism. It's a criticism Whitehead welcomes.
“Cultural relativism simply underlines the fact that there
are choices to be made,” he says. “It does not say what
choice you should make, it merely suggests you make your choice
in light of the best possible understanding.”
He suggests, for example, that some Americans have little business
condemning other cultures as violent without applying the same critique
to their own. “There's an open debate about the role
of violence in our culture, from how we see Hannibal Lecter as entertainment
all the way up to state executions,” he says.
In Whitehead's view — which, he allows, is one of an
outsider regarding U.S. affairs and policies — those judgments
often lack consistency. “We don't mind condemning certain
kinds of violence, but it's more difficult to make the connection
between the Columbine massacre, the D.C. snipers, and the presence
of a violent criminal justice system or a violently oriented foreign
policy.”
Those who study cannibalism today, he says, “are trying to
disaggregate cannibalism, [saying that] it's not always the
same thing, and it's not always obvious what it is. The Spartans
[in ancient Greece] would lick blood from their swords. Is that
cannibalism?” Medieval European doctors prescribed the ingredient
“mummy,” made from processed human bodies. In Denmark,
the drinking blood of living people (or freshly executed prisoners)
was thought to cure epilepsy. Are these practices cannibalistic?
Unlike the lurid accounts of native cannibalism in New Guinea or
South America, these other activities rarely get discussed in histories,
which Whitehead says illustrates that the taboos are alive and well.
“There may be all kinds of ritual behavior that involve mucking
around with human bodies,” he says. “We roll it all
up and say, ‘Ugh, cannibalism,' without thinking clearly
about what's going on.”
Few people have taken a closer look than Whitehead. But despite
having suffered personally from kanaimà, and despite having
made enemies in Guyana that may prevent him from ever returning
there now that his book is out, he doesn't consider himself
exceptional. “My work is by no means unique among anthropologists.
Many are working today in very troubling and challenging circumstances
around the world,” he says. “In anthropology, insofar
as we stay close to cultures, we necessarily deal with things like
violence and conflict.
It's more and more part of the job.”
And yet some jobs are tougher than others. Gaining an understanding
of dark sorcery and cannibalism, in principle, does not differ from
any other anthropological investigation. But some behaviors are
inherently difficult to explain. Cannibalism, Whitehead admits,
is “truly a challenging human behavior to interpret.”
David Tenenbaum MA'86 has written about cannibalism
for the science Web site The Why Files. To read more, see http://whyfiles.org/164cannibal/index.html.
1, 2,
3
On Wisconsin Home
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Unintended Consequences
- David Tenenbaum has written about cannibalism
for UW-Madison's science Web site, The Why Files.
- Mel Gibson portrayed Scotland's William
Wallace in the 1995 movie Braveheart. Wallace's struggle
to free Scotland from English rule at the end of the thirteenth
century resulted in his barbaric death and later reputation as
one of Scotland's greatest national heroes.
- Robert Louis Stevenson examined cannibalism in his 1890 book,
In the South Seas. Read his thoughts on the practice in Chapter
IX, titled "Long-Pig
— A Cannibal High Place."
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